The landed classes neglected technical education, taking refuge in classical studies; as late as 1930, for example, long after Ernest Rutherford at Cambridge had discovered the atomic nucleus and begu...
'Reedlike, that’s what Hedy Kiesler is, sweet and reedlike, and when she wants to talk to you she doesn’t lean over your shoulder and arch herself out behind like a debutante....She leans back from yo...
[Chemist Michael] Polanyi found one other necessary requirement for full initiation into science: Belief. If science has become the orthodoxy of the West, individuals are nevertheless still free to ta...
Arguably the greatest technological triumph of the century has been the public-health system, which is sophisticated preventive and investigative medicine organized around mostly low- and medium-tech...
Dr. Clara Immerwahr Haber committed suicide the same night.
For the scientist, at exactly the moment of discovery—that most unstable existential moment—the external world, nature itself, deeply confirms his innermost fantastic convictions. Anchored abruptly in...
When people look at a dangerous violent criminal at the beginning of his developmental process rather than at the very end of it, they will see, perhaps unexpectedly, that the dangerous violent crimin...
So Fermi said, Well . . . there is the remote possibility that neutrons may be emitted in the fission of uranium and then of course perhaps a chain reaction can be made. Rabi said, What do you mean by...
Bohr had learned to be alert for bright students who were not afraid to argue.
Now we are all sons of bitches.’
Violence is an instrumentality, not a psychopathology or a character disorder. Violence is a means to an end—domination and control—one of many possible means. Since its essence is injury, its efficac...
The 509th commander introduced Parsons, who wasted no words. He told the crews the bomb they were going to drop was something new in the history of warfare, the most destructive weapon ever made: it w...
There was very little doubt in my mind that the world was headed for grief.
If anybody says he can think about quantum problems without getting giddy, that only shows that he has not understood the first thing about them.
Only very rarely does an animal living under natural conditions in the wild die of old age.
The quiet child became a rebellious adolescent. He was working his own way through Kant and Darwin and mathematics while the Gymnasium pounded him with rote. He veered off into religion—Judaism—and ca...
In the real world it is meaningless to doubt existence; the doubt itself demonstrates the existence of the doubter.
Any account of science which does not explicitly describe it as something we believe in is essentially incomplete and a false pretense. It amounts to a claim that science is essentially different from...
He chose not to work through the limited official channels that the Army and the OSRD had devised to constrict the flow of information. I wanted to let Oppenheimer know what we were doing. Someone in...
Within twenty-four hours of Franklin Roosevelt’s death two men told Harry Truman about the atomic bomb.
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